It is often necessary to non-destructively inspect the condition of parts which may have complex shapes. One such part which may need to be inspected may comprise a floor beam having separate caps adhered to opposing flanges which are welded to a web to create an I-beam. It may be necessary to inspect the condition of the bond-lines between the caps and the flanges of the I-beam. One conventional method of inspecting parts is pulse-echo ultrasound. However, the difficulty with verifying bond quality using pulse-echo ultrasound is that the thin gauge of the cap material and the thickness of the adhesive layer may create an interface that is virtually impossible to resolve. The peaks in an A-scan representing reflections off the back of the first bond interface and the back of the cap may not be easily discriminated. The problem may be compounded by a variance in the thickness of the adhesive layer that may prevent accurate time-based instrument gating to be utilized. Another conventional method of inspecting parts is through ultrasound. Through ultrasound is often used when inspecting bonded structure during manufacturing, with a loss of signal amplitude used to find bondline anomalies. However, the geometry of an I-beam part may prevent the region of the flanges near the web to be inspected, because it may be difficult to use an inside transducer which does not run into the web. Since this region is generally the most critical portion of the flange, traditional through ultrasound may not be a good solution. Still another conventional inspection method of inspecting parts is reflector plate pulse-echo ultrasonic testing. A target may be placed behind the test specimen where the ultrasonic signal is sent through the specimen, reflected off the target, and sent back through the specimen to be received at the transducer. The amplitude of the reflected signal may then be analyzed to determine the quality of the specimen. However, in the case of a complex part such as an I-beam, the complex geometry of the web may require part specific tooling to be produced in order to implement the reflector plate method. This approach may be costly and inefficient to implement.
An ultrasonic inspection apparatus and method is needed to reduce and/or solve one or more problems of the conventional ultrasonic inspection apparatus and/or methods.